I Come as a Theif

by Louis Auchincloss

  “For what, Mr. Menzies?”

  “For our partnership. For our little silent partnership. Our little silent exclusive and very profitable partnership. I am suggesting, Mr. Lowder, that you agree to be discreet and honest with all the world—but me. I suggest that at chosen times and in very carefully chosen places, you and I meet to exchange useful bits of information about corporate secrets and government projects. I am an investor, and an investor needs news. That is all. Not much, is it? But on it we can build empires.”

  “Empires?”

  “Well, empires of Tiepolos, anyway.”

  “You assume I’m going to stay in government. Suppose I go back to my law practice?”

  Menzies shrugged. “Then I’ve lost my investment. But you won’t. You’ve got politics in your blood now. You’ll go far. Besides, you’ll have me behind you.”

  Tony stared, fascinated, at this small, smiling man. “Why should we trust each other?”

  “Because it will be so much worth our while.” Menzies suddenly clapped his small fat hands. “And because I’ve studied your record. I believe that this has been your first crime. Am I right?”

  “I’m glad you call it a crime, anyway.”

  “Oh, I know you,” Menzies exclaimed eagerly. “With anyone else, I’d have winked and used the word ‘peccadillo.’ But not with you. Not with Tony Lowder. You will be both an economist and a realist in crime. You will always know precisely what you are doing, and you will always be sensible enough to do the bare minimum. So long as you have only one Menzies and I only one Lowder, nobody will ever catch us. Nobody will even know were acquainted.”

  Tony put down his abominable drink and resumed his roaming of the great room. Never had he felt less a part of the real world. Had it not been for the sugar and grenadine in the cocktail he might have thought he was living in a dream—or in a 1935 movie with Norma Shearer and Clark Gable. Did all great men have a Menzies in their past? And yet what deal could have been more perfectly adapted to his needs? Where, even, was the risk?

  “But it must be understood that it’s only you and me,” Menzies cautioned him. “So far as Lassatta is concerned, you’ve become disgusted with bribery. He will have driven you back to grace. And your friend Leonard must think the same. I cannot afford to have anything more to do with that jackass. For, you see, Mr. Lowder, I, too, am returning to grace. You and I can’t afford the sloppy contacts of the underworld.”

  Tony came back and stood before him. “If I rejected your offer, Mr. Menzies, I should be making further hash of the hash I’ve already made of my life. Like Corneille, we must go on for the gloire.” Tony now threw back his head and uttered a shout of laughter. It occurred to him in the midst of it that Menzies might understandably take offense. But he didn’t. He laughed, too. “Mr. Menzies, I think I may be your man!”

  ***

  He telephoned Max from a pay booth and told him to meet him downstairs in the lobby of his apartment house. Because Menzies had asked him to exclude Max, he could not even wait until the morning to bring him in. They sat on a marble gray bench in the blank gray corridor, watching the cooperative owners, returning from work, walk hurriedly and sightlessly to their elevators. But Max seemed to find what Tony had to say difficult to follow. He scratched his knee; he scratched his ankle.

  “I know I can make it now with what we’ve got,” he assured Tony. “Herron’s up another five points today.”

  “Then we’re out of the woods. Because I’ve got the eighty-six hundred.”

  Max’s eyes glittered. “From Lassatta?”

  “Hell, no. We’re through with Lassatta. For good and all. From here on we work with Menzies. It’s not only safer. It pays. And it pays real money.”

  “Does Lassatta know?”

  “What the hell business is it of Lassatta’s?”

  “Oh, Tony, suppose he finds out.”

  “How can he find out? And why should I care if he does? We should never have got mixed up with Lassatta in the first place.”

  Max grasped Tony’s hand so tightly that his nails pierced the skin. All his old desperation had returned. “Let go, damn it!” Tony exclaimed in pain as he tore his hand free. “What’s come over you, Max? Have you lost your senses?”

  “Tony,” Max pleaded. “I’ve told you before, you don’t know the kind of men you’re dealing with. They’ll never let you get away with this. Do you think you can use Jerry Lassatta as a ladder to Lionel Menzies and then just kick him over?”

  “I didn’t use him as a ladder. Menzies approached me directly. The whole idea was Menzies’.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You found out about Menzies through Lassatta. He set the whole thing up. That’s the way he does business. And once he’s started something he never lets go.”

  “He should have thought of that when he welshed on the deal he made with us. So far as I’m concerned, he has let go.”

  “Tony, it won’t work, I tell you.”

  “Max, be realistic. What can he do?”

  “He can kill us.”

  Tony contemplated the pinched lips, the lined brow, the blinking eyes of his friend and reflected that he never should have told him. He should simply have arranged that Max share his profits. He tried now to make some of his old feeling come back by placing his arm around Max’s shoulders.

  “Steady, old pal.”

  “Oh, Tony, be reasonable!” And Max, shuddering, uttered a little sob. Tony’s heart hardened again, and he removed his arm.

  “I don’t know how long I can live with this terror of yours.”

  Max leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and covered his face with his hands. “I don’t know how long I can live with it myself,” he groaned.

  3

  On the Saturday after Easter Tony and Lee drove down to the end of Long Island to lunch with the Conways. The sky was so blue and the road so smooth that Tony could not help occasionally bursting into song. Lee was silent.

  “If you can’t enjoy today, you can’t enjoy anything,” he reproached her. “It makes one wonder if life was worth living before they invented the automobile.”

  “The automobile? I thought it was your investments that made you so happy. That stock that sounds like a bird. Herron?”

  “Well, of course, I’m glad Herron’s going up. And, of course, I’m glad that Horton has submitted my name to the President. I want to be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. All that is fine. Very fine. But don’t you ever feel that happiness can be just a matter of feeling well on a nice day?”

  “No. I keep thinking of Joan. Everything seems to be going so right for us, but it’s all going so wrong for her. So we should be exuberant—as you obviously are. And Joan should be desperate—as I gather she is. And yet I have the funniest feeling that I’m not that much better off than she is.”

  “You don’t mean you feel ill?”

  “No. It’s just that dying doesn’t seem as bad as it used to.”

  “Oh, Lee, on a day like this!” Tony’s sudden burst of exasperation flooded and drowned his sympathy. “What makes you so perverse? Haven’t I been doing all the things you wanted? Aren’t I less worried about money? Don’t I come home earlier? Hasn’t Max stopped telephoning at night?”

  “Yes. And I’ve never felt farther away from you.”

  Tony wondered with a groan if there were any point in scheming to make any woman happy. “You’re the most contrary creature I ever imagined. Why do you have to be this way now that I’ve got everything fixed?”

  “Why are you behaving so peculiarly?”

  “Peculiarly?”

  “You act as if every day might be your last.”

  “That’s a perfectly good way to live, isn’t it?”

  “But it never used to be yours. Now you act as if you’d been condemned to death, like Joan. Have you?”

  “Damn it all, enjoy yourself!” he cried. “That’s an order.”

  Joan’s house, appropriately called “Land’s End,” wa
s placed at the very tip of a stony peninsula that stretched far out to sea on the northern shore of the island. Its single gray story climbed up and down along the rocks with long glass windows that faced the Atlantic. Joan loved to spend winter weekends in it. She would sleep under heavy covers with the whole eastern side of her bedroom opened to the noisy sea. But now it was a benign day, and the Atlantic was calm and white and sparkling under the fight blue sky. Joan, in a scarlet shirt and white slacks, looking uncannily healthy and brown, took Tony by the arm as soon as they had appeared on the terrace and led him to a seat directly over the water. Obviously, she had no time for other guests.

  “I’m way past politeness, way past,” she explained sharply. “Everybody knows and understands, including Lee, so what the hell?”

  “But, Joan, you’re looking so well!”

  “It’s inside, honey, not out, and it’s there all right. Don’t worry about that. But I may have months yet, and months are beginning to seem like a lot of time to me. Tell me, do you really believe in nothing at all? About God and heaven?”

  “Oh, rot, of course I do. I used to say I didn’t because people expect you to. It’s not fashionable to believe.”

  “Really? Since when did you care about fashion? But, anyway, what do you believe in?”

  Tony carefully allowed his smile to fade. “I believe that when you die, you go to heaven and see all the people you love.”

  “And what do you do there? Play harps?”

  “If you want to.”

  “Forever and ever?”

  “Well, for a long time. For as long as you like.”

  She frowned. “You won’t be serious. You’re a meatball.”

  “I am serious.”

  “Oh, you’re serious about wanting to comfort me. You always want to comfort people. But don’t you see that all that cant about immortality and harps is even more scary than total extinction? Because in this life at least we have the mystery of death. But suppose there were no mystery? Suppose it were all explained and there you were. Just waiting?”

  “Well, then, maybe there is extinction. My point is that whatever it is, it’s going to be all right.”

  “I never heard anything so fatuous. But, of course, you don’t believe it. You’re just being nice. Everybody is. They comfort me and avoid me, as if I had leprosy. Leprosy! I wish I had.”

  “Joan.” He gripped her hand. “Joan, be quiet. Relax.”

  “Oh, Tony, it’s so hard to get used to.” She didn’t care that the others, talking louder, talking nervously, could see her tears. “And then the straws I cling to. Melanie Hunt, you know her. She’s on the Met board. She told me that they had a miracle at the Cloisters last Sunday. On Easter. Or rather Easter eve, at midnight. They’re keeping it quiet because they don’t want crowds trooping up. But one of the guards saw the Chalice of Antioch levitate. Actually levitate! It rose in the air three inches and just hovered there! And he called two other guards, who saw it, too.” After a pause she shrugged. “But then, I gather, it settled down and hasn’t been up since.”

  “How is that a straw?”

  Joan looked at him with mild surprise. “Well, wouldn’t it show that Christ was real or something?”

  “Would it?”

  “All right, you think it doesn’t.” She held up her empty glass imperiously to the butler. “And, of course, you’re right. They figured out it was some kind of electric effect in the cloth under the chalice. Caused by overheating in the furnace below or some damn thing like that. I don’t know. All I can be sure of is that my poor little miracle was no miracle. But do you know what, Tony? I went up to the Cloisters and stood for a whole hour before that bloody chalice. And do you think it had the manners to levitate even once? Even one tiny inch?” Tony shook his head. “You’re darn right.” She called harshly to the butler. “Where’s that drink, damn it?”

  Norry Conway, very big and scarlet-faced, with graying hair and haggard eyes, dressed in sport clothes that tried to defy death and cancer, came over to them, holding a small white Tiffany box.

  “It’s not really an anniversary, darling, but it’s a kind of one,” he said awkwardly. “According to my diary we closed title to this place exactly nine years ago come Tuesday. Anyway, as long as we have our friends for lunch today…”

  “And as long as we don’t know how much time I may have!” Joan interrupted him in a high, tight voice.

  Norry looked down at the terrace and shifted his package from one hand to the other.

  “Come, Joan,” Tony whispered to her sternly. “You can do better than that. I don’t care how sick you are.”

  “Watch me, then!” she exclaimed. She jumped up to catch the others’ attention. “Look, everybody! Norry has brought me an anniversary present. On the anniversary of our buying this land. Just nine years ago. Perhaps we should have waited for the tenth, but Norry has always been precipitous. Let’s see my loot!”

  She sat down at the round, low mosaic table in the center of the porch, and Norry placed the package before her. Everyone crowded around, and Joan raised the box so all could see. When she opened it, there was a deep general gasp.

  It was a huge square diamond, alone, free of ring or pendant, on a tiny black cushion. Tony recognized it at once and saw that the others did. It was the diamond that had been sold the preceding week at Parke-Bernet for six hundred thousand dollars, believed to have been purchased by a famous actress. It seemed to burn on its cushion, and yellow and blue lights started from it. Joan turned the box slowly around and around on the table before the hushed group.

  “Oh, Norry,” she murmured. “Oh, Norry, you angel.”

  Suddenly she picked the diamond out of its case and pressed it tightly against her heart, as if it might have x-ray powers that could penetrate her body and reach in deep to destroy the multiplying germs that were destroying her. She made a cup of her hands and held the jewel up to her face, leaning forward over it and rocking to and fro. She uttered a low murmur, like a croon. Tony was startled by the expression in her eyes. They were warm, vibrant, loving. She might have been a newly delivered mother looking at her babe.

  “Oh, Norry, I love it!” she whispered hoarsely. “Norry, I adore it!”

  In the atmosphere of general constraint Norry turned with relief to the white-coated figure of the butler appearing in the doorway. “Oh, is lunch ready, Len? Good, I think we can all use some.”

  ***

  The dining room walls were painted green and blue to create undersea atmosphere, and the only paintings, brilliantly lit, were three Odile Redons, of strange, jewel-like marine monsters. Tony was seated on Joan’s right, but she had placed her diamond before her, and she would not talk. But as he sat there silently, sipping his white wine, he experienced something that put conversation out of the question.

  At first, he had a sense of the sky darkening outside as if the sun had been clouded over. Yet he was facing the long, curved bay window that looked on the sea, and it was perfectly apparent that no clouds had diminished the brilliant sunlight that fell on the sparkling water. The darkness, which made him think of a scrim over a stage set, must have been a thing of his imagination, yet even when he closed his eyes and shook his head, he could not rid himself of this impression of darkness, right there, all over the room, permeating the harsh light, so that black and white seemed to coexist in a queer blend of blindness and vision.

  After some minutes, as the vision continued, he began to peer cautiously about the room at the objects and people. The Redon paintings, which he had always before admired, now seemed unaccountably dreary. They might have been executed by a commercial artist on the order of a department store. The beautiful Lowestoft that covered the table, blue and white, struck him as showy and pretentious, and the friends, all chatting about themselves, however lively and well-dressed, seemed the most ordinary of mortals. And yet even here his old sense of observation had not wholly deserted him, for he still could see that the Lowestoft was of a rare quality an
d he recognized that at least one of the guests was a near great poet. What was the meaning of the two levels of observation? What was he?

  He! Maybe that was it. As he saw himself, there were not—this was suddenly clear—two levels. He was sure of one thing only. He was the man to whom the room looked the new way. He was the man to whom the universe was now surpassingly dull. It would be his punishment to live in this dull universe. Punishment for what? His crime? Was he experiencing the old horror of solitary guilt in the presence of persons not guilty? Was he being swept with the despair of a damned soul who sees the elect in Paradise and knows that he can never join them, a despair intensified by the very failure of the elect to realize his excluded status and the cruel mockery of their continuing to regard him as one of themselves? But no, it wasn’t this. It was something much worse. They were not in Paradise and never would be. Paradise had disappeared. He had hurled himself out of it and had fallen into a strange limbo where he existed alone. The people who surrounded him—even Lee, yes even Lee—were not really people any longer. They were the ghosts of the people he had known in Paradise and, like all ghosts, they existed without pleasure or taste. Without companionship. And there was no seeming end to it.

  And finally, as if these realizations were only the whistling, stiffening breezes that immediately precede a storm, came the sudden inundation, through his mind and body simultaneously, of a misery, the intensity of which he had never even conceived. He held himself rigidly still, in the horrid apprehension that the least movement might make the pain worse, might make it unbearable so that he would scream and rush from the table.

  “What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?”

  Tony turned to look at Joan. Her face seemed strange and white. She might have been a visitor, in a hospital, looking down on him in a bed.

  “I suddenly realized I’m damned.”

  She continued to stare. “You look absolutely green. Would you like to go and lie down?”

  “No, no, it’s mental.”

  “You mean, like a depression?”

  “I guess so. A fit of depression. Except I wonder if it will pass.”